Chapter Text
Prologue
February 25th, 1986
“I cannot believe we didn’t get in Steve, I mean-”
“Yeah, because your fake ID is the most convincing thing Johnny Baker’s printed at his mom’s workplace in the last five years-”
“- and you know I’m partially blaming you anyway since you wouldn’t let me draw eyeliner on you. I mean it’s not like we know anybody here and it’s not exactly the place you’d have a shot at picking up the ladies so-”
“Please, how is that remotely relevant to why an over-21's club decided to take a closer look at your crappy ID and see that Johnny printed your birthday wrong so it says you’re 37- I mean feel free to take this as a compliment Robin, but you don’t look a day over-”
“- next time just let me PLEASE decide how you dress when you’re wingman-ing me at my only potential chance to meet other gay people on this godforsaken rock we call a planet, and I swear I won’t-”
“-17, so excuse me if I agree with them kicking us back anyway! ROBIN!” Steve huffs, whirling around to face her and planting a hand over her mouth to try and slow the rant before it reaches its peak and grows even further in volume. It had begun to rain gently and he’s cold, he’s tired, and frankly he's far too sober for this in the first place.
Robin is experiencing the opposite predicament. She's finally stopped for breath to lean against the alleyway wall around the corner from the 21 club, groaning and trying not to throw up. Steve had warned her not to drink too much before they tried to get in, but had she listened? Did anyone ever listen to his sage advice?
“Stop talking like Dustin, you’re about as wise as my twelve year old cousin and he’s failing like, three subjects at school.”
“Didn’t mean to say that out loud,” Steve mutters, slumping down on the ground and wincing as he tries to avoid sitting on too many damp cigarette butts.
“I just really thought we might get in, you know. I’ve heard they’re less fussy as long as you have some kind of ID, I mean maybe if we try again but we get Johnny to reprint mine-”
“God I am truly praying to anyone who can hear me for more girls who like boobies to start appearing in Hawkins, because this plan of yours sucked man. I’m sorry, Rob,” he says, bumping his shoulder into Robin's calf sympathetically. “At least I parked kind of nearby, give me some designated driver points for that.”
There’s finally a moment of silence in response where Steve can actually hear Robin's brain grinding to a halt. He listens to the music from the club behind them thumping softly against the noise of cars driving nearby in the rain, closing his eyes and exhaling through his nose. It’s no easy feat, trying to calm down from the nerve wracking experience of being in line for a club where he looks under-dressed, under-aged, and ready to be kicked back humiliatingly alongside his even more under-aged companion.
As the quiet stretches on, he realises the silence on Robin’s end is potentially more than her finally experiencing a rare moment of non-verbal self-reflection, and may actually be due to her holding a hand to her mouth and trying not to gag.
“Oh jesus-” Steve shifts stiffly, moving to stand but she turns to glare at him, furiously shaking her head.
“I’m fine! I’m fine, I just don’t particularly want to hurl in your car. Give me two minutes to walk it off okay, lets just… let’s walk down here away from.. from the sidewalk and people and-” she stumbles further into the back alleyway where the music has increased slightly in volume, and Steve sighs, following slowly.
“Just wait here okay dingus, I don’t want to throw up on your pretty boy shoes because I know how often you clean-”
“They were limited edition! When are you going to let that go, I swear-” Steve mumbles, exasperated and flushing pink as Robin moves further into the alley to empty her stomach contents behind Indianapolis’s finest gay bar.
He waits for her, thinking about the many different ways he could have told her no, no way before they tried to pull off this brain-dead stunt. Steve has always struggled with telling people no, especially Robin. And now it’s finally landed him in a puke-stained damp alleyway in downtown Indy at one in the morning. They could be at home, they could be curled up re-watching The Breakfast Club right now if he’d listened to his inner monologue and shut her down before this.
He wrinkles his nose against the unpleasant scent wafting through the back street, a faint yet deeply unpleasant mix of cigarettes, weed, and piss. The song in the club changes over, giving way to a brief intermission of quiet- and Steve listens to the faint hum of voices, likely from people who’ve left the club at the back entrance and gone out for a smoke.
He turns to look down the gap in the alley giving way to another back street, perpendicular to his and Robins. Under a faint and flickering street light, he can see two people pressed up against a stained brick wall, moving against the shadows.
Steve feels like an intruder on a relatively private scene- but he pauses before he can turn away, double taking as he makes eye contact with the man leaning back against the wall. His heart stutters in his chest, up, up, up through his ribs.
Tall, skinny, with dark, wild hair sticking up in every direction, and with a set of silver rings glinting in the streetlight glow as they grip the back of his partner's head, currently occupied with trying to shove open his leather jacket. Eddie Munson’s eyes rove over the alley to meet Steve’s- who’s frozen in place, unable to move, to breathe.
There’s an infinitesimal moment where he sees shock, surprise, confusion flicker across those wide expressive eyes, but then recognition gives way to something other, something dark, steely and changed.
Something animal.
Steve feels like prey. Rabbit in a trap, deer in the headlights. Like Eddie’s eyes are pinning him down, phantom limbs pushing him back against the wall, pulling his hair, keeping him in his place. Like his blood is congealing in his veins, slow and thick and hot, syrup and honey.
Eddie holds his gaze as the man he’s with groans into his neck, pushing him further against the wall. Steve tries to move- to break his gaze away, to do anything other than gawk openly as Eddie locks him in place with that intense eye contact, with that dark, hot, dirty look. His mouth is dropping open in a smile, eyelashes fluttering, breath huffing out in a puff of condensation in the cold.
It feels so, so wrong. It feels charged. It feels filthy.
I’m a voyeur, Steve panics, fuck, he’s stripping me bare to my bones, he’s devouring me whole, he’s drinking me neat.
“Okay, I think I’m good. When I tell you whisky is not my drink, I am reeeally not exaggerating in future, because wow that-”
The spell ends as Robin re-appears, looking pale and wan. Steve blanches, breaking from his reverie and moving forward to grab her, haul her away from whatever he just experienced. If she sees him she’ll know, I don’t know how but she’ll know what we were doing. He marches her back towards the main road, heart thumping double time, flesh alive with goosepimples.
Jesus christ, he thinks as Robin stumbles behind him complaining, this is the last fucking time I offer to wingman Robin, the last time I come near a gay bar, and the last time I ever make eye contact with Eddie Munson.
*
April 1st, 1986
The first thing he feels after opening his eyes is a wet and uncomfortable patch through the thin hospital blanket draped over his left calf. The pain follows of course, lancing up his side and filling his skull with static as he cranes his neck to see Dustin and Lucas sitting in chairs at the end of his bed, Dustin draped over his leg snoring softly as a steady stream of drool runs out to further the impressive stain on Steve’s blanket.
“Dustin! Dustin- wake up, Dustin, he’s”- Dustin startles into life as Lucas shakes his shoulder, jumping up from his chair to stand by Steve’s head and wow it is far too bright in this room, too loud.
Steve groans and covers his eyes. He feels like his body has been run over by a school bus and then rapidly aged by about fifty years. I have got to stop ending up in these situations, jesus.
“Finally oh my god, Steve you really had us worried there-”
“STEVE! Can you hear us? Can you understand what I’m saying? How many fingers-”
Steve struggles upwards, leaning on his elbows and shoving Dustin’s grimy hand away from his face, wincing as the pain burrows deeper below his ribs at the motion.
“Dude, get a nurse! How are you even going to tell if he’s brain damaged if we don’t-”
“Lucas you wouldn’t recognise brain damage if it hit you over the head with a bat full of nails, I’ve read enough to-”
“Fuck, m’ not brain damaged,” Steve slurs, pushing Lucas further back as well and squinting around the room to try and identify literally any other help. An adult form of help, please, preferably one with more medical training than two whiny fifteen year olds.
As if summoned, a tired looking nurse wheels into the room and corrals Dustin and Lucas away from the bed to help Steve sit further up, checking over the tubes running up into his hand, the bandages obscuring the source of pain at his side.
“Mr Harrington, how are you feeling? How much pain are you experiencing?”
“Felt better,” Steve huffs, relaxing back against the pillow. “Where am I? Is it over? Where’s Robin?” Who’s alive? Did anyone die? Am I dead? Is it finally over?
“You’ve been in an accident Steve, we can explain it all better for you in a bit but for now I need to ask you a few questions and make sure we’re fixin’ you up right as rain okay? I promise we can answer all your questions soon enough honey.”
He sits passively in a daze, trying his best to respond to her questions as two more doctors bustle into the room. Yes he’s in pain, yes he knows his name and where he lives, yes he knows who the president is- no he can’t remember what happened, the last thing he remembers is kneeling on the floor holding- holding someone-
“Don’t you worry about that okay, for now we just need to focus on you,” the nurse interrupts, tutting at him in a sort of motherly way .
They check his monitors and bandages and seem satisfied enough for now. Steve notices one of the doctors isn’t in a matching uniform- he’s wearing a different badge and has a gun tucked into a side holster. Government issue, his tired brain supplies, this man is government- maybe one of Owen’s men.
The boys are sitting at the back of the room, looking tired and scared, waiting for Steve to be free from the endless tirade of questions and checks, tests and medication adjustments. Alive though, they’re okay, I didn’t lose them, they’re safe.
Finally the room begins to empty, although Steve notices that the government man exits last and seems to remain outside his room, the back of his head visible through the frosted glass window in the door. Dustin and Lucas sidle back over to their chairs and begin to recount the last three days that Steve has apparently been unconscious in a hospital for.
Vecna is dead. Steve waits for relief to seep into his bones at this news but it doesn’t come, not until they assure him that everybody miraculously survived the last week. Max and Eddie are the most grievously injured, the latter having been put in a medically induced coma while they try to repair the severe organ damage he experienced.
Max is awake, but has multiple breaks across her arms and legs where Vecna had begun to attack her- “she’s gonna have the craziest casts, we want Will to draw some cool stuff all over them-” and is only alive because Eleven was able to break Vecna’s control long enough for Nancy to finish Vecna in person in the upside down. Steve does remember this through some sluggish blurry haze, he remembers them all setting fire to Vecna, the shock at the fact Vecna really did seem to lose control while they did so. Surely he took more than that, surely we didn’t all get out of this that easy.
As if from a great distance he hears Lucas and Dustin continue rambling about the Byers reuniting - “Hop’s been alive this whole time in Russia, can you believe it? They arrived yesterday-”
His brain begins to tune them out, unable to process any more news, both positive or negative. He’s overwhelmed, over-stimulated. Staring up at the ceiling in mute shock, his tired brain finally recalls the last moments before he fell unconscious.
The upside down beginning to wither, dying. Running, holding Robin's hand- Robin, where is Robin, is Robin okay is she alive- Nancy breathing harsh and violent behind him as they rush towards the gate. Running into Dustin, hysterical, screaming about Eddie. Running back from the gate, running to the corpse on the ground, he can’t leave him there, he can’t, he won’t, not when it’s his fault that this is happening, that Eddie-
The gate beginning to close, Robin screaming, begging him and Dustin to leave Eddie, leave his body, Steve vomiting over his shoes as he picks up Eddie’s limp form and drags him towards the gate-
“Eddie- you said Eddie was alive, how-”
“Yeah you saved him Steve don’t you remember? It was badass. I feel like I need to stop calling you my babysitter after that, I can’t believe you managed it. I thought- I thought he was gone”, Dustin says in a small voice, and suddenly Steve is transported back in time as he looks at him. Dustin looks no older than twelve, twelve and already coping with things most grown adults would never fully recover from.
“But you said he died,” Steve frowns, “the bats-”
“I mean I swear he was, I have no idea how he survived it”, Dustin replies, looking down at the bed again. “And when you pulled him through the gate and it closed, you didn’t let anyone check his pulse man, we had no idea-”
“What?! I don’t remember-”
“Steven,” Dustin says, suddenly stern, “like I have already explained to Lucas, the mind will often repress traumatic events-”
“Okay yes fine!” Steve rolls his eyes. This kid. “So we all got out, jesus, and then what, the paramedics just showed up? And the upside down is gone, hey presto?”
“The army did”, Lucas answers, looking at Steve warily.
“They came with Owens, and started acting crazy, rounding people up and shit- but they brought loads of paramedics, and they rushed you and Eddie off straight away to a hospital. And yeah, the upside down might be gone but Vecna messed up Hawkins pretty bad on his way out,” he glances over to Dustin, and they shift uncomfortably in their chairs. “The government says it was an earthquake but no way, it’s got to be Vecna as he died.”
Steve looks back up the ceiling, stunned. “Okay so what, what's the damage? How many people are dead, is Hawkins-”
“It’s not that bad!” Lucas assures him. “I mean it's mostly like… structural. The bottom end of town, where the gate was… it's a real mess. The lab, the quarry, the trailer park… the army has it all blocked off but the ground was super messed up. It was hard for them to get you guys out to the hospital I think. There were accidents, I don’t know exactly who else got hurt but I haven’t heard that anyone died so far. And-”
“And! And the army, the government- they came in and took over everything! All of our families had to sign so many NDAs,” Dustin interrupts, looking excited.
“But who cares about that- they cleared Eddie’s name! Owens listened to us about Vecna, or Henry or whatever. They made this big announcement at the town hall. Feels kind of like when Will ‘revived’ himself… but they made sure we all knew that it wasn’t Eddie’s fault, that Vecna was like… this serial killer, who faked his death and came back and screwed people up. They said he took Eddie hostage, and then he took us hostage when we went looking for him.”
My brain, Steve thinks, is not working well enough to process all of this. Suddenly, as if bubbling up from inside his chest, he starts laughing. His side aches in response, but he can’t stop, it roils through his body like a cresting wave, and he’s wheezing and leaning over the edge of the bed, almost sobbing between the laughter and the pain.
“A - serial killer-” he howls, “that’s how they’re going to try pass this off?!”
It’s too much, he realises- on top of everything else, to try and remember all of this bullshit cover up story- and as he lies back while Dustin and Lucas begin to laugh alongside him, he feels relief finally beginning to trickle through his body. That’s how Robin, Nancy, Mike and Jonathan find them, huddled up together over Steve’s bed, laughing hysterically as the late afternoon sun fills the room with a warm glow.
*
Two days later, Steve is finally discharged from his sickbed. He’s had non stop visitors, to the point where the nursing staff have had to stop them from sneaking in so Steve can actually get some well-needed rest and sleep. Nancy picks him up in her car as he leaves, and drives him back out to his house in semi-awkward quiet. In all of the madness over the past few days Steve hasn’t had a chance to re-evaluate the weird tension that was brewing between them during the lead-up to stopping the apocalypse, and it seems she isn’t keen to revisit the topic yet either.
“You’ll call, right, if you need anything? And Robin told me Keith knows you’re still recovering and stuff, so don’t worry about work. And I’m sure all of us will come by to visit anyway, not as though you can keep Dustin away for very long so just let me know if you need anything in the meantime, okay?” Nancy smiles weakly, as they pull up to his front porch.
“Yeah, yeah of course. Tell Mike I need to kick his ass when I’m better, managing to escape all this shit at the last minute to play hooky with his girl in California,” Steve says wryly. He stands, still wincing from the wound in his side, and walks up to his front door as Nancy reverses out back to the main road. It's cold for April, and he shivers as he lifts up a plant pot on the left of the door to extract the spare key and let himself inside. He’s not sure what happened to his main set, or his car keys- the car itself is still at Lovers Lake, Robin had informed him.
The hallway feels dead and empty as he pulls off his filthy trainers, a strange departure from the past week in the hospital where everything was constantly bright, loud and over-stimulating. He knows he should call his parents- he had lied to the staff at the hospital when they had asked and told them he’d call, but never bothered to pick up the phone. Nobody had known their numbers or location, not even Nancy, when he’d been unconscious.
That’s a task he can afford to put off a little longer, Steve decides. It can wait until after a long hot shower, a cup of black coffee, and two dry bowls of cereal seeing as the milk is rancid where it sits in his fridge. He stands at the kitchen counter in silence, cramming synthetically sweet puffed rice into his mouth, dry and sticky. The afternoon sun has faded out now, dimming the room and creeping in fingers of a darker, warmer light as the sun sets out across the floor. Nothing changes, he muses, nothing is different even after the end of the world.
He’s still alone in this cold and empty kitchen, the absence of his parents feeling more like shadows, impressions of a false life he once had. Going to have to get it over with eventually, god forbid they try and call me through all of this mess.
Padding over to the phone in their hallway, he braces himself to dial the extension line for the last hotel his mother called from a few weeks back. The line rings out, beep, beep, beep. Please hold. Please wait. Click. And-
“Hello?”
“Mom, hi. It’s Steve.” God his voice is so shaky. Embarrassing. He clears his throat, tries to pitch it lower, more confident, more King Steve.
“Oh hi darling- sorry it has been a while since our last call, hasn’t it? How are you getting on, how’s work?”
She sounds distant, pre-occupied. He supposes this really isn’t any different from when his parents do actually live in their own house, it’s an easy recollection back to the empty conversations they would have maybe once a month, after school, after practice, after failed college applications.
“Work’s uh, it's okay. Actually mom, I’m off work for a little while because- well I don’t know if you saw the news about the earthquake?”
“Earthquake?? What?” She sounds sharper now- her attention redirected.
But fuck Steve could kick himself. Of course the government would be trying to limit this news travelling nationally as much as possible- it was a shoddy cover-up story for an inexplicable natural disaster. He panics, backtracks, “just, just a small one! A local tremor or something it’s fine- I mean some of the town got hit a bit, the trailer park and stuff ....”
“Well that was always a bit of an eyesore anyway- is the house okay? Are you okay, you didn’t get hurt, did you?”
Is the house okay? Are you okay? Is the house okay?
That question is a wound. It’s festering as he processes it. He feels like he’s stepped outside of his body in response to that question. He’s looking back in on himself, trying to keep the pieces all together in a pile. He’s standing in the quickly darkening empty hall, holding the receiver up to his stitched up face, with his side ripped open and new bandages plastered over his waist and left leg.
But it's his chest that feels the worst right now, like a great pressure is building and expanding where his lungs should be. Someone has their hands in his ribs, pulling them apart. He squeezes his eyes shut tight against the pain and the lump that’s threatening to push up his throat, behind his eyes.
“Steven? Did I lose you? Hello?”
“...no mom. You didn’t lose me, I’m fine. All good.”
“Oh. Well- glad to hear that. I’m afraid your father is out at the moment but he of course sends his love. I had meant to call regardless actually- I know we said we would be home by the end of June but it’s really looking to be longer than that. Your father has been asked away on business to Canada, if you can believe it! That merger we talked about, the one-”
“No worries!” Steve interrupts, bracing. “Yeah that’s- that’s fine, so when are you guys thinking of coming back?”
“Well it’s looking more likely that it’ll be late August I’m afraid. I know your father wanted to spend a little of the summer with you so you can look at re-applying to business school, but I suppose that will have to wait another year at this rate”, she sniffs. “If you’re just working in the meantime-”
“Just- working yeah. I guess I’ll let you know if anything changes but that’s fine. Actually mom I don’t know what I was saying earlier- I am working at the moment, got a shift tonight so probably best to let you go so…” he tries to laugh shakily. What is wrong with me? What is wrong with me why won’t you-
“Of course. Say hello to that young lady of yours at the video store for us- and I’ll let your father know you called.” His mothers tone has returned to its primary state, half a world away and preoccupied with other, more interesting and critical things happening on her end. Far away from Steve.
He grimaces, thinking of what Robin would say in reaction to being called his young lady.
“Sure mom. See you.”
“Speak soon, bye darling”
The phone line rings empty and he’s left standing in the hall, thinking, this is the longest they’ve ever left me alone. They’d left in mid March- just before the whole world had gone to shit, and Steve had been glad initially. It’s easier in some ways, no different to when they are at home but there’s less need to pretend everything is normal. To pretend he gets a full night's sleep every night, that he knows what he’s doing with his life, that he doesn’t see the myriad of women his father brings home when his mother is out at some very important country club meeting, some business dinner.
Now he’s not so sure, as he eases himself into the lounge to lie back against the couch. He’s used to being alone, sure, but fuck- after the last few weeks he wishes the house was occupied with at least some other form of life, some kind of noise and motion. There is just no point wishing for something he gave up at the age of ten- that he had someone else at home, someone else on the couch to talk to, to be around.
As darkness finally creeps over the rest of the house, Steve falls asleep like that, in a deep and dreamless slumber, still in his jeans. It’s the last time he’ll sleep that length of time uninterrupted by night terrors for a long while. He wakes up cold and stiff at eleven the next day, wondering exactly how long he has until Keith summons him to man the front lines in Family Video. At least he’ll have company.